“What kind of patterns?” I asked. It seemed like a perfectly natural question, showing polite interest and keeping the conversation moving. But Chutsky swiveled around in his seat and looked at me as if I was something that might require a whole bottle of floor cleaner.
“This is funny to you,” he said.
“Not yet,” I said.
He stared at me for what seemed like an awfully long time; then he just shook his head and faced front again. “I don’t know what kind of pattern, buddy. Never asked. Sorry. Probably something to do with what he cut off first. Just something to keep himself amused. And he’d talk to them, call them by name, show them what he was doing.” Chutsky shuddered. “Somehow that made it worse. You should have seen what it did to the other side.”
“How about what it did to you?” Deborah demanded.
He let his chin fall forward to his chest, then straightened again. “That too,” he said. “Anyway, something finally changed at home, the politics, back in the Pentagon. New regime and all that, and they didn’t want anything to do with what we had been doing down there. So very quietly the word came that Dr. Danco might buy us a small piece of political ac-commodation with the other side if we delivered him.”
“You gave up your own guy to be killed?” I asked. It hardly 1 1 0
J E F F L I N D S A Y
seemed fair—I mean, I may be untroubled by a sense of morals, but at least I play by the rules.
Kyle was silent for a long moment. “I told you we sold our souls, buddy,” he said at last. He smiled again, a little longer this time. “Yeah, we set him up and they took him down.”
“But he’s not dead,” Deborah said, always practical.
“We got scammed,” Chutsky said. “The Cubans took him.”
“What Cubans?” Deborah asked. “You said El Salvador.”
“Back in the day, anytime there was trouble in the Americas, there were Cubans. They were propping up one side, just like we did with the other. And they wanted our doctor. I told you, he was special. So they took him, tried to turn him. Put him in the Isle of Pines.”
“Is that a resort?” I asked.
Chutsky gave a single small snort of a laugh. “The last resort, maybe. Isle of Pines is one of the hardest prisons in the world. Dr. Danco spent some real quality time there. They let him know his own side had given him up, and they really put him through it. And a few years later, one of our guys gets caught and turns up like that. No arms or legs, the whole deal. Danco is working for them. And now—” He shrugged.
“Either they turned him loose or he skipped. Doesn’t matter which. He knows who set him up, and he’s got a list.”
“Is your name on that list?” Deborah demanded.
“Maybe,” Chutsky said.
“Is Doakes’s?” I asked. After all, I can be practical, too.
“Maybe,” he said again, which didn’t seem very helpful.
All the stuff about Danco was interesting, of course, but I was here for a reason. “Anyway,” Chutsky said, “that’s what we’re up against.”
Nobody seemed to have much to say to that, including me.
D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
1 1 1
I turned the things I’d heard from side to side, looking for some way to make it help me with my Doakes infestation. I will admit that I saw nothing at the moment, which was humbling. But I did seem to have a slightly better understanding of dear Dr. Danco. So he was empty inside, too, was he? A raptor in sheep’s clothing. And he, too, had found a way to use his talent for the greater good—again, just like dear old Dexter. But now he had come off the rails, and he began to seem a little bit more like just another predator, no matter the unsettling direction his technique took him.
And oddly enough, with that insight, another thought nosed its way back into the bubbling cauldron of Dexter’s dark underbrain. It had been a passing fancy before—now it began to seem like a very good idea. Why not find Dr. Danco myself, and do a little Dark Dance with him? He was a predator gone bad, just like all the others on my list. No one, not even Doakes, could possibly object to his demise. If I had wondered casually about finding the Doctor before, now it began to take on an urgency that drove away my frustration with missing out on Reiker. So he was like me, was he? We would see about that. A jolt of something cold bristled up my spine and I found that I truly looked forward to meeting the Doctor and discussing his work in depth.
In the distance I heard the first rumble of thunder as the afternoon storm moved in. “Shit,” said Chutsky. “Is it going to rain?”
“Every day at this time,” I said.
“That’s no good,” he said. “We gotta do something before it rains. You’re up, Dexter.”